Representatives from three voting machine companies expressed
their criticisms against a California state-sponsored “top-to-bottom review”
that found “very real” vulnerabilities in their products.

The study was lead by UC Davis professor Matt Bishop, who
discussed the study at a hearing held by Secretary of State Debra Bowen, whose
office is currently deciding whether or not to allow the machines’ use during
the Feb. 5 presidential primary.

Under a contract with UC Davis and Bowen’s office, Bishop’s study
examined machines from Diebold Election Systems, Hart Intercivic, and Sequoia
Voting Systems. The conclusions, partially released last week, included
findings that the voting systems posed difficulties for voters with
disabilities and were vulnerable to intrusion. "It may be that all of [the
vulnerabilities] can be protected against. It may be that some cannot,” said
Bishop. According to Secretary Bowen, a
fourth company, Election Systems & Software, was also to be included in the
review but was omitted because it was late in providing needed information to
her office.

According to state law, Bowen has until Friday to set the
rules for the upcoming primary election. "I intend to go through a methodical
process to determine what to do next," she said.

Sequoia Systems, in a statement released
Monday on their web site, called the study’s findings “implausible,” objecting
to the fact that the study was conducted in a closed lab environment over a
period of weeks as opposed to a true election environment or in accordance with
ISO criteria. “None of the attacks described … are capable of success,” said
Sequoia sales executive Steven Bennett to a panel of officials from the
Secretary of State’s office.

Diebold and Sequoia further pointed out that the study
evaluated outdated versions of the voting machines and their software. “While
it cannot be guaranteed that all of the extremely improbable vulnerabilities
identified are prevented by subsequent product development and updates, many
are specifically addressed,” said Sequoia. However, Sequoia acknowledged that it
is working to insure that the “few system vulnerabilities” found could not be
used to tamper with election results.

“Voting system reliability is something we're always working
at improving … security is never finished,” said Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle
Schafer.

Hart Intercivic also objected to the study’s laboratory
environment, stressing it was not a considerable substitute for real-world “people,
processes, procedures, policies, and technology” and, in the company’s official statement,
suggested that a better study might “define a realistic threat that faces all
layers of security in an election.”

Even members of the security community have questioned the
study’s approach: “While the goals of this effort were
laudable, our organization is concerned about its execution,” writes
Jim March of watchdog group Black Box Voting, to Secretary Bowen. “Your
agency's review only partially examines the risks of inside manipulation with
these systems. Procedural remedies can be circumvented by those with some level
of inside access. In fact, we would contend that the most high risk
scenario of all is that of inside manipulation, and we would also contend that
the systems used in California cannot be secured from inside tampering.”

Since their inception, voting machines in the US have received
a bad rap amidst a storm of negative press, mishaps, and concern about their
ability to be tampered with:

In September 2006, Princeton researchers were able to hack Diebold’s
AccuVote-TS machine, going so far as to write a computer virus that spread
between other Diebold machines. Later, voting machines from Sequoia were also found to have similar vulnerabilities. “You can’t
detect it,” explained Princeton Professor Andrew Appel.

In the same month, a
team of untrained 54-year-old women from Black Box Voting, using 4 minutes’
worth of time and $12 in tools, were able to circumvent tamper-proof seals on
a Diebold vote scanner, and were able to replace the device’s memory card.

Also in September 2006, a consulting firm working for Ohio’s
Cuyahoga County -- which includes Cleveland -- found huge discrepancies
between the electronic and paper records kept by Diebold voting machines. Ohio
was a key swing state for the tight 2004 presidential election, and its
electoral votes help decide the result.

Earlier that year in August, Diebold voting machines botched
the Alaska preliminaries in several precincts as they failed
to connect to their dial-up servers to upload vote results, slowing the
election considerably. Officials had to hand-count votes and manually upload
the totals to the central server.

In December 2005, a Diebold whistleblower under the name of “Dieb-throat,”
who was once a “staunch supporter of electronic voting’s potential” gave a scathing
interview to The Raw Story accusing Diebold of
mismanagement and burying known backdoors in their own products, including
one that made the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Alert System
for the first
week of September 2004.

In 2004, Black Box Voting released a video demonstrating that
a chimp, given
an hour of training, was able to hack a Diebold voting machine. “What you saw
was a staged production ... analogous to a magic show,” said Diebold spokesman
David Bear, in response.

These findings, as well as others both negative and
positive, culminated in a March 2007 warning from the US Government
Audit Office as it testified before the Subcommittee on Financial Services and
General Government: “[E-voting] security and reliability concerns are legitimate and
thus merit the combined and focused attention of federal, state, and local
authorities responsible for election administration.”

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Bush did not win either election, he lost both races, but these machines were all rigged (as shown on TV)and we ended up with a fascist that has destroyed Iraq, and the USA.I remember when paper ballots were the only method of voting, and I vote absentee, either way gets an honest vote. These machines are all rigged, and if we do not DEMAND that we have paper ballots we will have another Rigged, and Election Fraud. The GOP is already planning another coup, of which they will then commit Martial Law, and then you will see all the military in the streets of the USA, not Iraq. I am 72yoa,and a student of Poltical Studies--BELIEVE ME!!!!!!!!

If a letter sent to you by the GOP with explicite do not Forward request gets returned to them, your right to vote will automaticly be challenged.

although if you are white anglo saxon protestant you will never see this letter since it seems it was targeted to minorities and the poor it was sent to Black university's in august and to our soliders in IRAQ.

Crack pipe? C'mon. It's a tad reckless to predict the future that way, but if past is prologue he might be right. Certainly nothing has been too unethical so far for the current crop of corruptos in power to resort to.

Leaving aside the standard "sneer at the messenger to invalidate the message" right-wing debate avoidance technique, consider the obvious in Ohio. a) 2002 - Diebold promises Ohio to the Republicans in 2004. b) 2004 - Ohio election looks crooked as can be and c) Ohio Republicans stop barely short of using shotguns to prevent outside investigations.

Generally speaking, people who refuse to be open have something to hide. Just like Gonzales, our micromanaging AG who "can't remember" anything, or Cheney's fourth branch of government refusing to divulge what they plan to do in case of another attack. Or even divulge who was present in the smoke-filled roooms where energy policy was planned prior to California's fraudulent "energy crisis."

In security, adding an entrance to a building doesn't increase intrusion vulnerability linearly. It's a nonlinear process. Keeping votes locally instead of transmitting them, encrypted, to a well monitored location is like adding a LOT of doors to a building. But a centralized database is much more vulnerable to insider manipulation. We're talking about Diebold here, a Republican-a-la-neocon ideologue as committed to centralized right-wing rule as the Roberts court. A centralized database then, but with decentralized, well sampled precinct-level paper receipts to verify results and keep the data keepers honest - that would provide a level of security no politician really wants.

Stop attacking someone who is alarmed at what he sees from his vantage point of, what was it, 72 years or so. Take a look at the facts and start to wonder why those cockroaches go to such extreme lengths to scurry away from the light.

In response I'd say to broaden our collective memories past the last few years and recall that the Democrat party has just as colorful a history of swinging elections as the Republican party could hope to aspire to. Even their legal methods of manipulating things, such as the many College Democrats I know who are registered Republican's for the express purpose of voting for the weakest candidate in the Primary, are just as dangerous to the ultimate outcome as a little actual vote tampering.

The safest assumption is that, unless foreign agents are intervening and committing fraud (and nearly every hostile foreign agent I can imagine, except for China, would prefer a dove rather than a hawk) then both sides are cheating in isolated local areas, and that the net effect is essentially zero because, praise be upon them for their wisdom, our founding fathers gave us the Electoral College which is essentially a safeguard against many such things.

I just hope that if Hillary pulls out a close win against who ever we run against her that my fellow Republican's shut the hell up about it instead of spamming the intertubes with their paranoia for going on SEVEN years now.

He doesn't know he was sending his absentee paper ballots to me. I (and the other black bag election thieving operatives in our mobile black helicopter postal intervention cell) was replacing them with my own, complete to matching the same crayon he used when he voted for Ralph Nader (but swapping his vote for a different candidate, of course), and the quiver in his handwriting from incipient Alzheimer's.

Now these electronic election dohickeys...they scare me. We can't just substitute our own ballots, poke out extra chads to invalidate votes we don't want, or substitute a fake lockbox prestuffed with tilted votes for the original one. <sigh> Looks like I need job retraining....

quote: I am 72yoa,and a student of Poltical Studies--BELIEVE ME!!!!!!!!

hahahahahahahahah, i will be laughing for a week thanks!!72yoa.. is that dog years in chinese?

On a side note, mr paranoia is only half crazy. With paper voting, at least recounts could be done to verify whether or not a wrongdoing had been committed. But with e-voting there is no such guarantee, and unfortunatly everyone in the world loves money, and it only takes one dirty person with the right resources too possibly change voting outcomes.

Adding unreliable electronic voting systems just adds to the uncertainty of it all. We need, at the very least, a voter-verifiable paper trail for these votes and random vote counts to confirm an electronic vote. Or, we simply do it the old fashioned way and count paper ballots. Either way, it's critical that in a democracy that the people have confidence in their vote and that the vote be counted accurately.

There is alot of theory that the 2004 election was rigged. I also see a lot of FUD in is article, lots of assumptions based on statistics. What have we learned about statistics? There are lies, dirty lies, and statistics.

I'm not saying the elections weren't rigged, I'm saying that there is conjecture, theory, and little hard evidence. I think some of the conspiracy theorists put in some overtime on this issue and made a mountain out of an ant hill.

quote: I'm not saying the elections weren't rigged, I'm saying that there is conjecture, theory, and little hard evidence. I think some of the conspiracy theorists put in some overtime on this issue and made a mountain out of an ant hill.

There is plenty of hard evidence. Just do a Google search for "voter caging" and you will find that Tim Griffin, one of Rove's flunkies, when trying to send one of caging lists to GeorgeWBush.com, he made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails — potential evidence of a crime — to email addresses ending with the domain name “@GeorgeWBush.com” he sent them to “@GeorgeWBush.ORG.” A website run by prankster John Wooden who owns “GeorgeWBush.org.”

I don't waste time with the wingnut Daily Kos conspiracy theories. The Democrats (liberals) are in control of Congress and if there was any real shred of truth to a "stolen" election in Ohio, Nancy & Co. would be on it like wolves on a carcass. I find it amusing that every time a Republican wins an election, it must have been "stolen" yet when we hear about voter registration fraud with dog and dead people votes, illegal immigrant votes, and convicted felon votes, they say nothing. Is it any wonder Democrats are so vehemently against voter ID? Intimidation my ass. You think they complain about being "intimidated" when carded to cash a social security check? Please. Wisconsin's 2004 election that went to Kerry: 1,489,504 votes to Bush's 1,478,120 votes. Democrats would have screamed, claimed fraud, and demanded a recount had those numbers been reversed. I'm way over it.

Yeah I know, Reagan didn't clean Carter's clock in 1980 by the biggest landslide in US history, and Gingrich Republicans didn't Roto Rooter Congress by a landslide in 1994. Yeah genius lib, we know they all cheated somehow. Idiot.

BTW, "neocon" is a term you liberals need to understand the definition of instead of spewing it out like so many other words mindlessly (like lie , etc.). A "neocon" is a former socialist liberal who found his way out of the fog. I am not now or ever was a pinko liberal. I have my head out of my ass.

The conservatives were handed an election in 2000 that they didn't earn, and people still aren't over it because it set the tone for the years leading up to now.Its funny how the conservatives will be so quick to shrug off an archaic system of voting for a leader. A system where (using 04's numbers) a person could win the presidency with 33,357,643 and his/her opponent gets 88,864,990. Watch the conniption fits of mindless conservatives if that happened to them.

OMG this has been beat to death. Get over it already. The New York Times (conservative paper?) went to Florida and recounted the votes themselves. Guess who won?http://www.nytimes.com/pages/politics/recount/Let's count em until we have them all thrown out! Hangin, swingin, dimpled chad.....crosseyes counters....Odd how this country managed to hold elections for over 200 years. It's almost like trying to watch a NASCAR race.For those that want a paper receipt, how long do you think it'll take for the forgeries to start?Doesn't matter who wins, the losing side will always say someone, somewhere, somehow cheated. The conservatives were handed an election in 2000 Indeed/sarcastic

As for the 2004 election, we all know that one was "rigged" too. Just look at the vote margin. Clearly, the GOP cheated here as well.http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/politics/2004.../more sarcasmDo a search in election history, fraud is always claimed by someone. Both parties have let us down, but no one seems to hold them accountable short of mouthing words and conspiracy theories. Where are the practical solutions?

Yes, a leader can be chosen with 33.3m votes versus an opponents 88.8, or I assume you're correct at least with your argument.

It also shows the failure of the public school system to insert critical thinking alongside all the liberal bias they instill. Good job. Of course, critical thinking is the mortal enemy of liberalism anyway.